Batman: Arkham City

Exciting fighting, crime-solving sequences. Excellent voice acting. Huge amounts of unlockable content. Ability to play as Catwoman puts a fun new spin on game play.

Cons
Borrows voraciously from previous game. Some aspects of story and game play stretch suspension of disbelief too far. Boss battles too easy. Many side missions don’t compare favorably with main game mode.

Bottom Line

Batman: Arkham City never improves on the qualities that made Batman: Arkham Asylum great, but its richly varied game play and nearly flawless fit and finish make it one of the more enjoyable games of 2011.

Arkham City Is Action CityThe good thing about basing, well, all of Arkham City’s mechanics on those introduced in Arkham Asylum is that the earlier game got them almost entirely right. You really are thrust into the life of a scientific superhero, and having access to all of Batman’s analytical equipment, gadgets, and pugilistic know-how means you always have plenty of things to do and interesting ways to do them.

Combat retains both aspects of its suspenseful, visceral allure. The first is when you’re facing off against random inmates using only your fists: Batman has a wide range of attacks and tactics at his disposal (some of which are unlocked as the game progresses), and you can supercharge up your combo score by using them and equally clever counter moves in nonstop sequence. There’s nothing quite like doing a one-man takedown of a dozen bad guys, some of whom are brandishing stun sticks or full-body shields, in just moments. Second are the room-based battles, in which you try to pick off a select number of assailants as quickly and quietly as you can. Just as in Arkham Asylum, you can swoop down from a hidden perch, silently knock out someone, then grapple back up to the ceiling before anyone knows you’ve been there. This type of encounter is the most distinctive, and the one that best uses the most aspects of the Batman character.

If there's a flaw to the fighting, it's that most of the boss battles are uninspired and simplistic, usually requiring you to only identify your foe's blatant weakness and then exploit it mercilessly. Many of the bigger group battles need (or at least benefit from) more careful and in-depth planning, and thus feel more rewarding as a result.

There's a lot more to the game than just combat. Come across a bullet hole or a blood trail at a crime scene and you can use Detective Mode to track it back to its source. Discover a computerized locking mechanism and hack into it with your cryptographic sequencer. Pull out your batarang to get a quick hit on a far-away target, or your bat claw to yank down a grate or pull yourself closer to the opposite wall when you’re floating on a raft. Or, most fun of all, leap from the top of the top of a tall building and glide for minutes at a time, your cape billowing behind you as you silently soar.

Peppered through all this are the Riddler's trophies and challenges, which have been drastically increased in number (to over 400) and complexity since Arkham Asylum. Many of these unlock a dizzying amount of new content in the form of new character and location art, single-player survival and ranked competitive modes, and still other ways of expanding the game beyond the 15 or so hours the main story requires. The Riddler even has a subplot of his own elaborate enough to be its own game—many of the other subsidiary quests, such as tracking down ringing phones, street assaults, or tracking a mysterious observer in far-flung locales, are less involved and thus less involving.

Enter the Cat(woman)You are not, however, limited to playing Batman this time around. In what is by far the biggest departure from Arkham Asylum, purchasers of new copies of the game (in other words, ones that have not been pre-owned) get to step into the high heels of Selina Kyle, aka Catwoman, at several points during the main campaign. Though all of Batman’s controls work with her, many of her moves are a bit different. For example, rather than grappling all the way to a building’s ceiling she’ll whip onto the side then pounce up the wall; and of course she can’t fly. Her combat moves also differ, though they’re so similar you won’t have any real trouble picking them up.

Playing Catwoman is admittedly a fun diversion, and she has her own selections of upgrades and Riddler trophies, but she feels somewhat gratuitous. Aside from the issues of her skintight leather cat suit (with a front zipper that is at permanent half-mast) and hypersexualized combat moves, she adds little to the story. She appears in only a few scenes, most of them peripherally related to Batman's antics, and none of them is particularly absorbing. Though a nice change of pace, Catwoman injects only momentarily varied life into the game-play experience.

Matthew Murray got his humble start leading a technology-sensitive life in elementary school, where he struggled to satisfy his ravenous hunger for computers, computer games, and writing book reports in Integer BASIC. He earned his...

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